It’s 2026, gas prices are still too high, and oil executives are warning the White House that costs could get worse before they get better. The Trump Administration is taking note.
And if the Democrats want to win in November they will need to stop talking like policy wonks and start talking like consumers.
Environmentalists love to talk about climate targets, emissions pathways, and the latest technologies, but voters are thinking about something simpler: the utility bill on the kitchen counter, the price at the pump, and whether the lights are going to stay on in a summer heat wave.
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been hindering our country’s energy resources for the last year and a half. They are paying off companies to stop them from building new energy supplies. Last month, the Interior Department paid TotalEnergies $1 billion to walk away from two offshore wind leases off the coast of New York and North Carolina, projects that would have powered nearly one million homes. Seven states recently sued the Trump Administration over this decision.
While the Administration pays companies to cancel new power generation, it forces ratepayers to subsidize older, costlier coal plants that should have been retired years ago. The Department of Energy has ordered six aging plants to stay online past their planned retirement. One plant in Michigan racked up over $180 million in costs, over $600,000 every single day the plant is forced to remain open, passed on to customers across 11 states, and an independent analysis found the full program could cost ratepayers nationwide between $3 billion and $6 billion each year. Three of the five forced-open coal plants are not even producing electricity. Voters are paying for aging, dirty and unreliable coal plants that often aren’t even running or working.
What has the Trump Administration done for voters? Household electricity bills in Pennsylvania, the country’s second-largest natural gas producer, have climbed 31% since 2020, faster than the national average. Nearly one in four Pennsylvanians say they struggled to pay an energy bill in 2024. One woman in West Virginia took out a loan this winter to cover an electric bill bigger than her paycheck. U.S. power consumption hit record highs this year and is forecast to keep climbing as data center demand accelerates.
Voters are taking notice. Our polling in battleground districts found that 70% oppose the actions Trump and his allies have taken on energy, 69% oppose canceling wind and solar projects, and 69% oppose new rules to make renewable energy harder to build. By a two-to-one margin, voters prefer new clean energy to new fossil fuel sources to meet rising demand. Even a third of Republicans agree.
For Democrats, the winning message is not complicated. Americans want more energy of all kinds, delivered fast, at lower cost, on a reliable grid that can handle a hotter climate, a more electrified economy, and rising demand from technologies like AI.
The candidate who says, “I’m for building more power and bringing your costs down,” is on much stronger ground than the candidate who sounds like they are refereeing an ideological fight between students in a Harvard seminar.
There are three things every Democratic candidate should be saying out loud between now and November.
First, call it out: MAGA Republicans are responsible for raising your electric bill. The federal government is paying companies not to build new supply, forcing aging coal plants to keep running, and gutting the tax credits that bring new energy generation online faster and cheaper.
Second, talk about getting results quickly. The new gas plants MAGA Republicans want will take the better part of a decade to permit, finance, and bring online. With AI usage soaring, that’s not fast enough. A utility-scale solar and storage project can be permitted, built, and delivering power in three years. Candidates can lower voters’ bills by committing to cutting permitting timelines, fixing transmission queues, and getting new generation connected to the grid.
Five years after Winter Storm Uri exposed the catastrophic failure of the Texas grid, Texas has added more renewable capacity than any state in the country. ERCOT now operates one of the world’s largest battery storage fleets. Texas electricity rates are the lower than the national average and roughly 30% below California’s.
Third, ensure companies pay their fair share. The buildout that data centers and large industrial users are driving should not show up on a retiree’s utility bill. Mikie Sherrill ran a version of this in New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger ran a version of this in Virginia. Both won. Neither sounded like a climate candidate. Democrats are trying to fuel innovation and ensure the companies who benefit most foot the bill.
Our opponents will keep saying what Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been saying for a year: that fossil fuels are the path to “energy dominance.” When we tested that frame against voters, it fell flat. The phrase voters used in our research, unprompted, was that the MAGA energy playbook sounded “ripped out of 1986.”
Democrats have a once-in-a-generation opening to advance a clean energy agenda. Taking advantage depends entirely on whether they can stop sounding like the party of taking energy away from voters and start sounding like a party determined to build more of it.
And it’s not just Democrats. Our research shows that Republican candidates who embrace clean energy might have the most to gain, if they can credibly distance themselves from Trump’s actions.
The data indicate we can win this fight. We just have to be willing to wage it.
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